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America’s Next Top Economist

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle is discouraged by a National Journal report that Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago economist and adviser to Barack Obama, is not a slam dunk to be appointed the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. Here’s the report, by Alexis Simendinger for the Lost in Transition blog for National Journal and Government Executive magazines:

Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee — once the chief economic adviser to candidate Barack Obama — may be less of a shoo-in to chair Obama’s White House Council of Economic Advisers than his admirers once imagined.

The Obama transition team is interviewing to find a woman, perhaps a minority woman, to fill the CEA chair — a Senate-confirmed position. Informed sources suggest the candidates on the CEA list now include Princeton University economics and public affairs professor Cecilia Elena Rouse, whose specialty is labor economics. The hunt for a woman, explained several sources close to the transition deliberations, is aimed at broadening the white-male cast of the White House team assembled to date (the current tally of announced picks is 3 women, 9 men).

Goolsbee, a respected University of Chicago professor, remains in contention for other administration posts, the sources added.

McArdle, writing at her eponymous blog for The Atlantic, dubs herself “flabbergasted.” She writes, “Needless to say, given that Obama’s sterling choice of highest-caliber economic advisors was one of my main reason for supporting him, my regret is mounting faster than ever.” She also says:

More to the point, the worst financial crisis in seventy years is really not the time to see if you can brighten up the CEA offices with a nice, decorative matched set of X chromosomes. Goolsbee has been advising Obama since the beginning; presumably, this is some sort of testimony to the esteem in which Obama holds his competence. Throwing him overboard now makes this look like less of a “plus factor” and more like Obama is much less concerned with competence than painting a pretty picture for voters. Given the stakes, that’s more than a little irresponsible.

(The National Journal report, however, suggests that Goolsbee has been on the outs with Obama for some time: “Goolsbee became embroiled this year in a minor controversy about Obama’s views on trade. After notes from a meeting between Goolsbee and a Canadian government official became public in Canada — suggesting that Obama’s chief economic adviser had winked that his candidate’s trade-pact critiques were less about policy convictions than political maneuvering — the media had a field day. Obama denied the accounts and defended Goolsbee. But by early June, at the start of the general election, he added another policy adviser — centrist economist Jason Furman, from the Brookings Institution — to his team, and Furman assumed the task of communicating many of Obama’s policy views.”)

Tyler CowanCowen, the George Mason economist who blogs at Marginal Revolution, is considerably less worried by this development than McArdle is. “This could be either good or bad news; in any case the goal is to maximize his influence,” Cowan writes of Goolsbee.